Peter’s Vision Calls All Christians to ‘Communitarian’ Living
The Catholic Worker was never meant to be an alternative to the Church, but to create new cells of vibrant Catholic community living a Gospel-centered way of life.
This is the first in a series of articles Colin Miller is writing for The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It’s reprinted here with his permission.
Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City in 1933. In the depths of the Great Depression, the Movement consisted of hospitality houses for the homeless, group discussions about the social teaching of the Church, farming communes where the faithful could learn an alternative to industrial ways of life, and a newspaper called The Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker was never meant to be an alternative to the Church, but simply be one way that the Church could embody the Gospel-way-of-life in the world today.
One thing that is often missed about this vision is the way it was designed to create new cells of vibrant Catholic community. This is why Maurin called the Catholic Worker way of life “communitarian.” By this, he was emphasizing that daily community life and shared tasks were essential to the life of the Church. This was long before anyone had ever thought of our Archdiocesan synod or the invitation to join a small group, but they are certainly the sort of things Maurin would have heartily endorsed.
By “communitarian,” then, Peter didn’t have in mind any political party, then or now, that might go by that name. Rather, he wanted to distinguish the Catholic Worker from “communism” on the one hand (which was a live political option at that time), and from the normal “individualism” of American life on the other. He was emphasizing the Church itself as a distinctive way of life, a live alternative to others on offer.
The Catholic Worker, in other words, was meant to simply be an embodiment of the Church being itself. And this, for Maurin and Day, necessarily meant that it would include Catholics being deeply enmeshed in the business of each other’s lives. Hospitality houses, the daily practice of the works of mercy, shared work, regular meetings for discussion and reflection, corporate liturgy, weekly or daily meals together, the pooling of resources—all these were ways they advocated that the Church could be more of a community. This is what he meant by communitarianism.
Once again, Peter saw this kind of thick community as essential for the life of the Church. In other words, we can’t really be Christians without it. Today we think of community as an optional add-on to our faith. For most of us, Church-going consists of coming together for Mass—even perhaps for daily Mass—but too often not having any real-life connections with one another. We wave as we pass the Peace, say our prayers, and then head off to our own lives.
But things were not always this way. I regularly hear stories about a time, still within the memory of some older members of our parishes, where there were thick social bonds uniting Catholics in St. Paul. One octogenarian I talk to often tells of living on a block with a half dozen other Catholic families. Each morning around breakfast time, she relates, her back door would open and ten neighborhood kids would scurry by as she made breakfast, using her kitchen as a shortcut as they all went off to the parish school down the street. The families cooked together, ate together, shared childcare, took care of each other when someone was sick, shared lawnmowers and cars and rides, grieved together when someone died, helped out when someone lost a job, played football in the street, and dropped in unexpected just to chat.
Surely such communities were not perfect, but they do show a much closer resemblance to the ideal held out to us in Scripture than the reality of most of our lives today. The early Church, says the Acts of the Apostles, ate together, prayed together, took care of the poor together, shared their possessions freely, and met regularly in each other’s homes (see Acts 2:42-47). Such daily fellowship was not just “hanging out,” but doing these things that simply were the practice of the Faith. Their social bonds, you might say, were the Gospel itself. They couldn’t be Christians without each other.
Of course, exactly what the Church’s community looks like will vary from place to place and from time to time. It looked one way in first-century Palestine, one way in a medieval village, one way in the Great Depression in New York City, and yet another way in St. Paul 60 years ago.
But there is no doubt that we will have to reclaim, in our own way, something like Peter’s communitarianism, something like what we see in Acts, if the Church is once again to become at all socially credible to a world that sees mere individualistic piety as totally irrelevant. We will have to become, in other words, a way of life that makes people once again say “see how they love one another” (Tertullian).
Colin Miller is a member of the Maurin House Catholic Worker (Columbia Heights, Minnesota) and the Director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at the Church of the Assumption in St. Paul. This article first appeared in the December 2023 issue of The Catholic Citizen and in the Nov. 20, 2023 issue of The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.
